This, Too, Shall Pass...

Donald Trump, as is his wont, has stirred up another hornet's nest by ridiculing Ben Carson's Seventh-Day Adventist religion and refusing to apologize. It started at a rally in Florida when Trump said:

I'm Presbyterian. Boy, that's down the middle of the road, folks, in all fairness. I mean, Seventh-day Adventist, I don't know about. I just don't know about.

When asked about this comment on This Week, Trump said:

I would certainly give an apology if I said something bad about it. But I didn't. All I said was I don't know about it.

Yeah, right. It's the old Fox News trick of condemning something by asking leading questions about it.

But this was after Carson questioned Trump's religiousness, saying,

By humility and the fear of the Lord are riches and honor and life and that's a very big part of who I am. I don't get that impression with [Trump]. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't get that.

And this is also after Carson made lots of political hay among conservative voters by claiming that Muslims cannot be president because Islam is incompatible with the Constitution.

Now, I'm sure Carson is right about Trump: Trump doesn't give a crap about religion; he never has and never will, because it doesn't make him any richer, and money is the only thing Trump cares about.

But Trump is also right about Seventh-Day Adventism: it's a kooky apocalyptic annihilationistic religion. It shares many features with conservative Islam: they insist on an absolutist and "literal" (i.e., their own) interpretation of the Bible. They have a self-proclaimed prophet (more than one, actually) who claimed intimate knowledge of God's holy plan. Their holy day of rest is not on Sunday, in opposition to most of Christianity. They anticipate the world will end soon in a conflagration between the true believers (them) and mainstream Christianity, which they believe is in league with Satan. And this global conflagration will be caused by Christians trying to force the Sabbath to be on Sundays, persecuting Adventists who celebrate the Sabbath on Saturday.

This is Adventist's major concern, and it's totally ridiculous: with each passing year we are getting further and further from forcing the Sabbath to be observed on Sundays, with almost every state eliminating mandatory Sunday closing laws and allowing the sale of everything from automobile to alcohol sales.

But more importantly, why would the creator of the universe care how humans set up their calendar? Which day is the seventh day of rest comes down to whether you define the first day of the week as Sunday or Monday. And that depends on the date when you start the cycle of days of the week.

Adam never wrote a damned thing down: no one did for thousands of years. Moses didn't get the tablets from God telling him to to keep the Sabbath holy until some time between 1600 and 1200 BC. Given that writing didn't exist when the world was created, and arithmetic and calendars wouldn't be created for three or four millennia after the ostensible day of creation, we have absolutely no way of knowing what day should be the first day of the week. Thus, the exact day on which the Sabbath is celebrated is totally arbitrary and essentially random.

Christians have switched calendars four times since the time of Christ: from the Hebrew, to the Roman Julian calendar, to the Christian Julian calendar, to the Gregorian calendar. So how can know really know anything about what the right day is to celebrate the Sabbath?

William Miller, the founder of Carson's religion, predicted the Second Coming would occur on various dates in 1843 and 1844, recalculating the End Times several times. Adventists called it "The Great Disappointment" when Christ failed to appear. Yeah, it's so disappointing that the world didn't end and millions of Christians who weren't Adventists didn't die because they honor Sunday as the Sabbath.

Most Adventists also revere Ellen White as a prophet, even though the Bible is supposed to be God's last word and the Bible warns against false prophets.

Carson himself believes literally that the world was created in six days just a few thousand years ago, and that evolution is the work of Satan.

Like Trump, the average Republican voter knows nothing about Adventism. If they did, they would lump Carson and his religion in with the Jehovah's Witnesses, Scientologists, Muslims and Wiccans.

The Republican race is beginning to look a lot like the last Republican primary, when they cycled through nuts like Bachmann, Gingrich, Santorum, and Cain before finally deciding on boring Mitt Romney. This time they started out the the boring guys like Bush and Christie, then flirted with Trump because of his big mouth. They're getting tired of the bombast, and already they're toying with Carson because they find his somnolent droning a soothing change of pace.

Carson, too, shall pass, probably when Ted Cruz goes bananas because he's bored and running out of cash.